In praise of ... Keir Hardie

In praise of ... Keir Hardie

Monday 22 September 2008 19.01 EDT
First published on Monday 22 September 2008 19.01 EDT

Two years ago, the 150th anniversary of Keir Hardie's birth passed unmarked. Yesterday, at a Guardian fringe event at the party conference in Manchester, the man who founded the Labour party, familiar to most only as a bearded ascetic glaring from a Victorian photograph, was named as its greatest hero. Hardie, the impoverished and, until he was 17, illiterate Lanarkshire miner who wanted a movement that would declare war "on a system, not a class" shaped a Labour party that would be reforming rather than revolutionary. He owed much to low church Christianity and appealed to middle-class radicals as well as working-class trade unionists. Hardie was a passionate advocate of social justice, redistributive taxation, republicanism and women's suffrage. In 1892 he won in West Ham and became the country's first socialist MP. At Westminster, he turned the cloth cap into a badge of honour, but an attack on the monarchy cost him his seat. He devoted himself to unifying industrial and political campaigners into one movement. It was launched in 1900 as the Labour Representation Committee and Hardie became one of its first two MPs. He continued to espouse radical causes, calling for self-rule for India and equality between the races in South Africa. He led the party he had created until 1910, when he gave up to concentrate on international socialism and pacifism. A man "indivisible from his gospel", he was perhaps not a politician for our times, but one whose influence ought still to be felt.